Page:The Psychology of Shakespeare.pdf/42

Rh indicates the strong hold which the horrible imagination takes on him.

“Stars hide your fires; Let not light see my black and deep desires; The eye wink at the hand, yet let that be, Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see.”

But in Macbeth's letter to his wife there is not a word by which the enterprise can be said to be broken to her, and she expresses her own fell purpose before their meeting. At the first moment of their meeting, she replies to his asser tion, that Duncan goes hence to-morrow : “O, never Shall sun that morrow see ''' The idea of the crime arises in the minds of both man and

wife, without suggestion from either to the other; though in Macbeth the idea is a “horrible imagining,” while in Lady Macbeth it is a “fell purpose.” Lady Macbeth's subsequent taunt, “What beast was’t then

That made you break this enterprise to me?” “Nor time nor place did then cohere, And yet you would make both,”— appears to us, though we dare hardly say it, a flaw in the plot. It is certainly inconsistent with Lady Macbeth's lan guage at her first meeting with her lord. The truthfulness of these expressions can only be saved by supposing them to have referred to confidences between husband and wife on

Duncan's murder, before Macbeth went to the wars; a sup position inconsistent with the development of the wicked thought as it is pourtrayed after the meeting with the weird Sisters.

The terrible remorseless impersonation of passionate ambi tion delineated in the character of Lady Macbeth, is not

gradually developed, but is placed at once in all its fierce power before us in that awful invocation to the spirits of evil.